Helen Razer

LAUDED once by John Cleese as "the lost Python", Eddie Izzard now shows his evolution into a reptile that is entirely unique. There's no other lizard quite like Izzard.

Certainly, the vestigial Python nonsense on which Izzard slithered to fame is evident; we can picture the Flying Circus as he offers us limericks in the voice of an angry dinosaur or renames Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species as Monkey, Monkey, Monkey, Monkey, You. But, there is a warmth and a (chaotic) sense of civic-mindedness at the foundation of his work absent in the cold, if brilliant, Python oeuvre.

A great deal of Izzard's charm inheres in his willingness to be terribly silly. In a show that purports to trace the spiritual evolution of humankind, the author takes fantastic liberty with fact. To see him tear about like a mad kitten in the shreds of ill-remembered Old Testament stories and bad science is enormous fun.

Izzard's is a bravura sprezzatura; there is colossal technique at the core of his anarchic blasts. There is also great heart. Unlike many comics slavishly committed to the cause of atheism, Izzard appears to care less about making cruel fun of religion and more about taking his secular clergy into challenging intellectual territory.

That he elevates debate by impersonating a giant squid is to his enduring credit. Rarely do we see cleverness unfold from the primitive mouth of a cephalopod. Entirely evolved and fatally funny, Izzard is of a singular genus.